Mary Tudor (53 page)

Read Mary Tudor Online

Authors: Linda Porter

Renard found the small group of councillors to whom the emperor had written suitably receptive:
Your majesty had never laid the queen and her country under so great an obligation, and in the name of the queen, her realm and themselves they most humbly thanked you for this holy, good, profitable and necessary reminder. Though some of their number had already thought of it, yet the matter was so important and personal to the queen that they had not dared to make so bold as to mention it to her … they repeated that they could not tell me how agreeable my message had been.
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He then tried to soothe the fears of known opponents to the Spanish marriage in the queen’s household by calling on Sir Robert Rochester ‘in his room’ and presenting the controller with a personal letter from Charles V. Affecting to sound out Rochester on ‘his opinion as to what alliance would be best for her [the queen] and the country’, he even went so far as to say that he intended to guide the negotiation by following Rochester’s advice, something which they both knew was a lie. Sir Robert gave little away, beyond saying that he ‘felt wonderfully obliged to your majesty … for having written letters on the subject yourself’. He offered no opinion as to the identity of a suitable husband, but he did warn Renard that ‘the queen had some dangerous men in her council, persons who felt no devotion to her but only feigned it for the time being because they could not do otherwise’. He wanted the ambassador to be careful to whom he spoke, pointing out that in Waldegrave and Englefield the queen had ‘councillors old as well as new’, and that they were true, good men.This glimpse of ill feeling among the privy councillors did not surprise Renard, and he realised that he would have to proceed with caution,‘to keep in with some and confide in others.This problem is so difficult as to pass my capacity.’ Nevertheless, he was confident that Mary had already made the right decision:‘I believe that when she summons me to speak privately to her she will give me a plain affirmation. ’
In this he proved to be entirely correct. At about midnight of the same day on which he penned his dispatch to the emperor, Mary sent him a short note. She told him that ‘Paget knows what is happening’, but that she would like to speak to Renard in private before doing so in the council’s presence. He came full of expectation and was not disappointed. Mary had made up her mind.
The queen wanted the agonising over her marriage to be over, but she had not pushed ahead without speaking to her advisers. Perhaps she was not always entirely frank with them, but then neither were they with her, or with each other. Her past made her long for emotional certainties that her rational intelligence knew would be difficult, if not impossible, to attain. Still, she hoped at least for consideration and cordial relations with a husband who was a member of her family. And she wanted a prestigious match. However much her household staff loved her, they could not make out a convincing case for Edward Courtenay.
We have only Renard’s word for what actually took place on the evening of Sunday, 29 October, but, even given his penchant for representing Mary as skittish and suggestible, there is no reason to suppose that he greatly exaggerated what passed between them. Only two other decisions in her life - the acknowledgement of her own illegitimacy in 1536 and the determination to fight for her throne - were of equal importance to her. ‘She told me’, reported Renard,
that since I had presented your majesty’s letters to her she had not slept, but had continually wept and prayed God to inspire her with an answer to the question of marriage that I had first raised at Beaulieu [New Hall]. As the Holy Sacrament had been in her room, she had invoked it as her protector, guide and counsellor, and still prayed with all her heart that it would come to her help. She then knelt and said
Veni, creator spiritus
. There was no one else in the room except Mrs Clarencius and myself and we did the same.
 
Did Susan Clarencius, he wondered, follow all this? Mary and the ambassador spoke in French but presumably Mrs Clarencius knew very well her mistress’s mind by this time. Mary then explained her decision and how she had reached it.
She had considered all things, thought over what I had said to her, and had also spoken with Arundel [who by now had also received his letter from the emperor], Paget and Petre. She believed what I had told her of his highness’ qualities and that your majesty would ever show her kindness, observe the conditions that were to safeguard the welfare of the country, be a good father to her as you had been in the past and more, now that you would be doubly her father, and cause his highness to be a good husband to her.
 
She spoke as Mary the queen and Mary the woman, confident still in divine guidance: ‘She felt herself inspired by God, who had performed so many miracles in her favour, to give me her promise to his highness there before the Holy Sacrament and her mind, once made up, would never change, but she would love him perfectly and never give him cause to be jealous.’
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At peace with herself after a long struggle, she meant every word she said.
Simon Renard was relieved and delighted. ‘If she had invoked the Holy Ghost, I had invoked the Trinity to inspire her with the desired answer,’ he told Charles V. But he also knew that it would be difficult to progress things until the queen made her decision public, something which she did not seem inclined to rush, and that opponents would not suddenly abandon their efforts to get her to marry Courtenay. In fact, the approach from Charles V galvanised the party that supported an English marriage into action, to the point that a fracture in relations between the queen and her ‘old advisers’ could not be evaded. Both Rochester and Gardiner avoided seeing Renard, while attempts were made to get Englefield, who was ill and unhappy at the break-up of his marriage, back to court. Rumours that the queen had made up her mind for Philip antagonised the French and the Venetians (who had no love for the emperor) equally. Feelings in London ran high, and though Paget assured the imperialists that Mary would never change her mind, the entire question seemed to be still up in the air. By mid-November, when the House of Commons sent a deputation to see the queen, a confrontation could not be avoided.
They were an impressive gathering of lords, temporal and spiritual, and members of the House of Commons. Having very recently, and not without some acrimony, repealed all of Edward VI’s religious legislation, perhaps they thought that the queen would now heed their concerns. Mary, for her part, was fully aware that this was a public occasion, and even though it touched on matters that were very private and personal to her, there would be no tears or prayers. She had a role to play in such circumstances, and it called for dignity and majesty.There was a need to demonstrate the full extent of her queenship while exhibiting restraint. And restraint was certainly needed, as the Speaker of the Commons, Sir John Pollard, set forth the concerns of her parliament.
Pollard, a trained lawyer and judge, was elected Speaker in Mary’s first parliament, and he brought to bear all his legal training in the presentation of the case for an English marriage to the queen. He gave ‘a long and carefully composed discourse, full of art and rhetoric and illustrated by historic examples, in order to arrive at two objects: to induce her to marry, and to choose a husband in England’. Mary, who rose to greet the deputation, was obliged to sit down as Pollard droned on about the present state of the succession, what would happen if she died childless, the danger posed by Scotland under such circumstances and the desirability of her having children of her own. So far, she found him long-winded but would not have taken exception to his overall drift. But then he launched into the most delicate part of his brief,‘all the disadvantages, dangers and difficulties that could be imagined or dreamt of in the case of her choosing a foreign husband’. Aside from displeasing the entire population of England, both people and nobles, such a choice conjured up a vision of disaster, with a wicked foreigner lording it over the English, depleting the country of money and arms and finally removing Mary physically from the kingdom, ‘out of husbandly tyranny’. He was, in other words, going to be the husband from hell.
Mary had already grown restive when Pollard, warming to his theme, unwisely committed his greatest faux pas. He asserted that ‘it would be better for the queen to marry a subject of hers’. In so doing, he completely lost the queen’s fast-disappearing patience.Without waiting for the chancellor to answer on her behalf, as protocol dictated in such circumstances, she replied herself. Given the presumption, the evident carelessness of her own feelings and the insult to her position as queen, she showed remarkable forbearance.
She … thanked parliament for their good offices in persuading her to marry, and said that although it was contrary to her own inclination, she would conquer her own feelings as the welfare and tranquillity of her kingdom were in question. She would marry, but she found the second point very strange. Parliament was not accustomed to use such language to the kings of England, nor was it suitable or respectful that they should do so. Histories and chronicles would show that such words had never been spoken, for even when the kings had been in childhood they had been given liberty in questions of marriage.
 
Thereafter, the effort of remaining measured in what she said nearly proved too much, as she stated dramatically that ‘if she were married against her will she would not live three months and would have no children’. She soon recovered her equilibrium, however, assuring them that she was mindful of her coronation oath and that she always thought of the welfare of her kingdom, ‘as a good princess and mistress should’. It was impossible to challenge her further, and the deputation retired without achieving its underlying aim. Almost everyone present seems to have found the outcome uncomfortable, and Arundel could not refrain from the opportunity of scoring points at Gardiner’s expense by scornfully noting that he was essentially redundant, since the queen had usurped his role by answering herself.
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This, though, was nothing to the stinging rebuke the bishop subsequently received direct from Mary, when she told him she suspected him of having inspired the Speaker. ‘She did not wish him to make any mistake and would tell him openly … that she would never marry Courtenay. She never practised hypocrisy or deceit, and had preferred to speak her mind, and she had come near to being angry on hearing such disrespectful words.’The bishop, an emotional man himself, was in tears as he denied her accusation.
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Mary, though affronted by what had taken place, was not shaken in her determination one iota. Like Renard and Paget, she wanted to press ahead with the details of the marriage, the treaty and its terms (which the emperor accepted must be as favourable to England as possible) and preparing the ground in England, since this was an aspect stress and pride had caused her to neglect. She knew very well now the kind of opposition she faced and the dangers that might ensue. In order to tackle these effectively, she must also make another decision, very close to home. Her marriage did not automatically solve the question mark that hung over the succession.What was to be done about her sister?
 
Elizabeth was still at court, in a thoroughly unenviable situation. She was often with the queen, who insisted that they attend mass and vespers together, but was not in Mary’s confidence. Her entire future was under review without her participation and she had acquired, through no fault of her own, an influential enemy in the imperial ambassador. Perhaps even more alarming in the short term was that her name came up so often in tandem with Courtenay’s, as an alternative wife if Mary would not have him. Mary never said whether she and Elizabeth discussed Courtenay, but it is highly unlikely that Elizabeth viewed him any more favourably than did the queen. She was not keen on the idea of marriage at all, and she had plenty of opportunity to observe Courtenay’s increasingly ill-judged and petulant behaviour as he realised that his star was waning. And though she was socially isolated, she was not without her backers. Paget believed that constantly thinking of her as an enemy was unwise because it risked creating a danger that was not really there. Nor, he argued, could she be removed from the succession without repealing the very same act of parliament that Mary had used to justify her own accession. He thought it was ‘better to keep in with Elizabeth than to antagonise her’, and he ‘entirely disapproved of those who wish to put her in the Tower’ and counselled that the best course was ‘to reduce her with kindness’.
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But he was a firm adherent of the view that Elizabeth could best be contained by marrying her off to Courtenay. Renard did not concur. He believed, probably with justification, that Paget was looking to his own future if Mary should die without direct heirs.

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